Bug link to MS

THE bacterium Chlamydia causes multiple sclerosis, a controversial new study suggests. If it's right, patients would benefit from simple antibiotics.

MS affects two and a half million people worldwide. As the disease progresses, brain cells lose their fatty myelin sheath and become less efficient at transmitting electrical signals, causing debilitating symptoms ranging from tremors to blurred vision.

Researchers believe an autoimmune disorder makes the body attack its own myelin, and have suspected that the trigger might be infection by a virus or bacterium. Now, Subramaniam Sriram and his colleagues at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, say that the culprit might be C. pneumoniae, a bacterium associated with heart disease and possibly even Alzheimer's (This Week, 15 August 1998, p 24).

To find out if the bug plays a role in MS, Sriram extracted cerebrospinal fluid from a man with rapidly progressing MS. From this, his team cultured ...

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